Online video game environments continue to yield remarkable moments for gamers. Just like television shows replay highlights of remarkable moments from physical games, online video game environments show replay highlights from video games. Unlike physical games (e.g., soccer), where there may be only a limited number of highlights, online video game environments provide opportunities for literally millions of highlights. These highlights may be automatically captured in “game clips”. While it is likely that many of these “highlights” will never be watched, it is also likely that some game clips will become very popular and may even go viral. Unfortunately it may be difficult to predict which game clips will be popular and which game clips will not be popular.
Since the automatic generation of game clips that capture highlights in online video gaming environments is relatively new, predicting which highlights will be the most popular is a relatively new issue. In one example, automatic generation of game clips occurs in response to pre-defined conditions being satisfied in a game. When the conditions are satisfied (e.g., character dispatched, goal scored, high score achieved), the game clip is automatically generated. Additionally, since different delivery techniques that facilitate accommodating different download conditions (e.g., bit rates, processor power) are available, handling the difficult to predict most popular videos in multiple ways that facilitate improving a user experience for viewing those multiple versions of the most popular videos is also a relatively new issue. Conventional progressive download, where a portion of a game clip must be downloaded before display of the rest of the game clip can begin may provide a sub-optimal or even painful experience. However, encoding all game clips for download and viewing using techniques that are superior to progressive download in terms of user experience is impractical and perhaps even impossible. Game clips may consume significant amounts of memory, and encoding game clips for smooth streaming may consume significant processing time and power, especially when encoding for smooth streaming via adaptive bit rate streaming. Adaptive bit rate streaming involves detecting a user's bandwidth and processor capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of video stream accordingly. For adaptive bit rate streaming, source content may be encoded at multiple bit rates, where each of the different bit rate streams are segmented into small multi-second parts. Encoding all game clips for smooth streaming may be too expensive to maintain or outsource, may be too resource-intensive to be economically feasible, or may have other issues.